from the pay-attention dept

Among friends who pay attention to my Kickstarter-backing habits, it's become a bit of a joke that I seem to be obsessed with wallets. And it's somewhat true. By my count, I've backed 11 wallet projects on Kickstarter. I will also admit that there was a period of time (basically all of 2013) where I would actually make sure to check Kickstarter for new wallets once a day, though that's since stopped. It definitely did border on obsessiveness. Another friend of mine has ordered about the same amount (I think at last count he was at 13 such projects). We've joked that we should set up the "museum of Kickstarter wallets" between the two of us. I still can't fully explain what made me so fascinated with finding a better wallet, but I think it was a combination of factors. After years of using a Costanza wallet, I saw a friend's minimalist wallet, and it just made sense to me. The problem, though, is that for all the neatness and organization of a minimalist wallet, you're definitely giving up some features to shrink down the wallet. And thus began the perpetual hunt for the more perfect minimalist wallet.

Kickstarter has now posted an article that feels like it was written with me in mind specifically, discussing why there are so many wallets on Kickstarter, since others have noticed that Kickstarter is basically the place to go for everything in wallet innovation, among other things. There are a few reasons for this that the article presents, including the fact that wallets are, generally speaking, a relatively simple product to make. Thus, for many creative folks, it's a good "test" project, to see if they can design, sell and manufacture something straightforward. But, there's another reason described that I think is much more interesting, and it explains in part why I started to become infatuated with seemingly minor differences between the various wallet projects. It's that there are so many different variations on how to make a wallet, and it's really tempting to find that "perfect" variation:

Answering this question is where we step into the realm of true maker geekdom. Wallets are ultimately all about the small details — those tiny pebble-in-your-shoe subtleties that suit one person’s needs and ruin the next person’s day. “It’s a product that has to do a lot of different things at the same time,” says Dimatos, “and you can’t push one part of it without pulling on the others. Make your wallet too slim, and congratulations, it now fits nothing.”

Scan through the history of wallet-project designs, and you’ll see the same broad strokes repeated. Zoom in on the details, though, and what you see isn’t simple repetition — it’s more like a strange form of evolution and natural selection. There are certain basic wallet forms: the slim leather billfold, the elastic sleeve, the two rigid plates. But each iteration of them tweaks one element, or optimizes another, to find its own niche, like bird species evolving to pick berries from different parts of the same tree.

Obstructures’ design for the Aluminum Plate Wallet, for instance, owes a bit to one of Kickstarter’s earliest slim-wallet hits. The picture on the left above is
the Humn:
two carbon-fiber plates, held together by a flexible band. One member of the Obstructures team had tried out the Humn, and noticed an issue: when he spread the two plates apart, tension on the band stayed high. If his fingers slipped, the plates could snap back together on them. So the Aluminum Plate Wallet (in the center) was designed to release the tension when the wallet was opened. Obstructures band the plates together with two O-rings; to open the wallet, you roll one ring out of its notch and down toward the other. Tension adjusts accordingly. (There’s a manufacturing perk, too: O-rings are common, easy to source, and don’t need to be cut to measure.)

This month, you could find the same notch-and-ring system in the
Bracket Wallet
(on the right). But the Bracket design tweaks something else: where the Aluminum Plate has a solid, substantial, elegant look and feel, the Bracket runs back toward the same breezy minimalism as the Humn, with bright, slim carbon-fiber plates.

Similar things happen to every design. The elastic sleeve keeps mutating, evolving niche features to suit different backers. “They’re all very different,” says Sutter. “Things like the
Crabby
versus the
Slim
versus
TGT
— they’re all using similar principles, but I don’t find them redundant.” It’s more like one big process of crowd-based personalization; wait long enough, and there’s a good chance someone will tweak the wallet in a way that suits you. “Everybody’s got their own way of innovating within that archetype,” says Hall. “The metal wallets aren’t terribly different, but they appeal to different sensibilities. Some people like more tools integrated. Some people prefer making it as compact as possible. I think there’s still a lot of room to play with it.”

That describes my view of it as an outsider perfectly. The deeper I dove into the new wallet pool, the more quickly I could look at different projects, and the little tweaks they had made, to judge whether they were an improvement on something I'd already seen, and worth experimenting with (one other factor: if you focus on cheap wallets, it doesn't get too expensive, and while some wallets are pricey, many are quite inexpensive).

But what also struck me about the quoted section above is that it so directly repeats one of the key points we've made for years about the general process of innovation. As we've noted, innovation is an ongoing process of experimentation, as different people try different things and figure out what works. If you've spent much time in truly innovative environments, you'd know that this is a key part of the innovation process. For years, we've talked about the difference between ideas and execution, and that becomes quite clear in cases like this. Some of the wallets may seem like good ideas, but the execution is terrible. A few of the wallets I've received have been close to unusable (which also helped convince me to back off my wallet obsession). But it's also why competition is such a huge part of the innovative process.

What you see in the wallet/Kickstarter space is a really interesting innovation petri dish -- happening because of lots of easy experimentation and tons of competition, as different folks try to innovate around a few basic concepts to make a more perfect product. The Kickstarter article describes it as evolution, but it comes down to Elon Musk's idea of the velocity of innovation.

The larger point, however, is that all of this innovation and competition and evolution is happening because so many different folks are trying to make that perfect wallet for a group of customers. That is, what's driving people is the ability to make a better product and better serve a market. Note that nowhere is there any discussion on "intellectual property" or locking up an idea. If someone patented the use of o-rings to bind together two plates, or some of the other common structures, it would actually slow down the innovation as there would be fewer opportunities for others to innovate and improve on one another's ideas.

This is why it gets so frustrating to see people insist that somehow you need intellectual property protections to create innovative markets. We see all the time that there's often much greater innovation in markets where there's much greater competition and where the focus is on making the best thing for the customer. As a result, we see a much more rapid pace of innovation in such markets.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, my personal favorite Kickstarter wallet projects are (in order) the FITT, the Ainste and the TGT. Those three have come the closest to what I like, but I've checked out plenty of variations to see if anything improves on those designs. And, of course, none of those may meet your personal needs, but that's why this competitive market is so useful. There are probably other projects that are more interesting to you.

from the to-get-us-to-open-our-wallets dept

You know how content and product producers hate when the public recreates what they do on their own? Like when somebody with the copyright on a David Bowie song went all nutso over a fan film? Or when the music industry took a position so ridiculous that it could be compared to the slogan "Home Cooking Is Killing The Restaurant Industry"?

However, nothing is more frustrating than purchasing something expensive with your hard-earned dollars and having it fail on you. In this article, we want to address a common problem for men: their wallets don't hold up. It's a source of pride to build something that you can call your own.

Too true, but one wouldn't expect that to result in a blog post by makers of quality wallets to teach everyone how to make their own quality wallets. The rest of the post is a rather detailed, informative set of instructions on how to make a wallet in the same manner that Bison Made makes them. It's essentially an informative version of a patent, minus all the supposedly progress-promoting restrictions. Perhaps you're asking why they would do such a thing. They do not answer that question explicitly, but I would suggest it's a simple matter of confidence. Take the way the post ends.

Bison Made uses these same basic principles when producing quality leather carry goods. Instead of paper patterns and hand cutting, we use high precision cutting dies to create consistent leather components that are hand finished and stitched. We have taken a position that by starting with high-quality raw materials and detailed precision, beautiful and functional works that are designed for life will follow.

In other words: here's how to make what we make, and it's real, but we are really, really good at it. Also we have the materials, machinery, and know-how. So here's our designs. Here's what we do. Feel free to make it if you like. But if this explanation of what we do helps you appreciate all the work that has gone into our business, you could always spend a little money with us to get the real thing.

from the also-known-as-'progress' dept

I recently joked that it felt like the main purpose of Kickstarter seemed to be to convince the world they wanted simplified wallets and fancy ink pens. If you don't spend much time on Kickstarter, you may have missed that those two categories seem to account for a somewhat-larger-than-expected percentage of projects that people find interesting. The wallets, in particular, fascinate me, because thereareanabsolutelyinsanenumberofnewwalletprojects, withnearlyeverysingleoneclaimingtohavereinventedwallets. I had no idea that the wallet market was open to such disruption.

Of course, it may be open to an entirely different form of disruption. As Nick Bilton at the NYTimes recently pointed out, as his smartphone has been able to do more and more, he's beginning to think that wallets may be becoming entirely obsolete. There's almost nothing he still needs to carry on his person since nearly everything that used to be in his wallet can now be taken care of via his smartphone:

Printed photos, which once came in “wallet size,” have been replaced by an endless roll of snapshots on my phone. Business cards, one of the more archaic forms of communication from the last few decades, now exist as digital rap sheets that can be shared with a click or a bump.

As for cash, I rarely touch the stuff anymore. Most of the time I pay for things — lunch, gas, clothes — with a single debit card. Increasingly, there are also opportunities to skip plastic cards. At Starbucks, I often pay with my smartphone using the official Starbucks app. Other cafes and small restaurants allow people to pay with Square. You simply say your name at a register and voilá, transaction complete.

But wait, what did I do with all of the other cardlike things, like my gym membership I.D., discount cards, insurance cards and coupons? I simply took digital pictures of them, which I keep in a photos folder on my smartphone that is easily accessible. Many stores have apps for their customer cards, and insurance companies have apps that substitute for paper identification.

It's not entirely obsolete, but Nick makes a compelling case that it's heading in that direction. To be fair, many of the new wallets seen on Kickstarter are, in effect, responses to this trend. The most popular styles appear to be "simplified" or "minimal" wallets that shrink down what you have to carry, so that you can just take the few essential cards with you. But, it's possible that many people will be able to get by entirely without a wallet in the not-too-distant future.

This, in turn, reminded me of something else: about how disruption may destroy industries while making our own lives better in the process -- but that simple economics tends to do a bad job recognizing that. I've talked about how traditional economic measures might measure the wrong thing. So, if we're looking at wallets, for example, those in the wallet-making business might claim that this move towards the digitization/smartphonification of everything is "bad" for the "wallet industry." That's obviously silly, and most people aren't too concerned about the wallet industry. But that ignores just how many industries are being totally upended by the smartphone. Think of all the things you don't need any more due to the smartphone. A few months back, the Cato Institute put together a fun chart on "dematerialization" due to the smart phone, trying to make the argument that advances in technology, such as the smartphone, might also be good for the environment, since they lead to people needing a lot fewer physical devices, since they're all packaged into that tiny device in your pocket:

Of course, what this also points out is the nature of disruption and innovation. Disruptive innovation, by its nature, destroys entire industries or segments of industries by making them obsolete. If you simply measure the economic impact on the fact that those industries are no longer present, or that those products are no longer being sold for hundreds of dollars, you could argue that there's a negative impact on the economy. But, if you flip it around and look at (a) how much better our lives are, in that we have access to all that at the touch of our finger tips in a single smartphone, and (b) that as compared to buying all those other devices, individuals actually get to keep more money to themselves (though, not necessarily in their now obsolete wallets) to be spent in more productive ways, it seems like it's actually a really good thing.

But this is something that we often struggle with from a policy standpoint. While no one claims to be missing "the fax" industry, lots of industries at risk of disruption will do all sorts of things to angle policy makers into blocking that disruption, by arguing about the economic impact of their own industries, and falsely implying that, if they're disrupted away, all of that money somehow "disappears" from the economy. But the nature of innovation is that we make things obsolete by making other things better and more powerful and changing the way we do things. The end result is, generally speaking (and, yes, there are exceptions), better for everyone, enabling them to do more with less and do so more productively. Whether it's a "wallet" or the entire list of things in the graphic above, progress has an amazing way of destroying old ways of doing business, and we shouldn't fear or worry about that, we should celebrate it.